The 3 tenors in concert 1994, Los Angeles, full - YouTube The 3 tenors in concert 1994, Los Angeles, full Want to watch this again later? Sign in to add this video to a playlist. Need to report the video? Sign in to report inappropriate content. Rating is available when the video has been rented. This feature is not available right now. Please try again later. Published on Aug 9, 2012 Recorded live on stage on the eve of one of the worlds greatest sporting events, The 3 Tenors in Concert 1994 re-unites four of classical musics premiere and most popular talents. The legendary tenors José Carreras, Plácido Domingo and Luciano Pavarotti, together with conductor Zubin Mehta, celebrated the finale to soccers 1994 World Cup with a concert described as probably the biggest single musical event in history.

Brought together for the 1990 World Cup in Italy, The 3 Tenors and Mehta joined forces again, this time in Los Angeles Dodger Stadium on July 16th 1994 with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Los Angeles Music Center Opera Chorus, to perform a selection of operatic arias and international favorites specially orchestrated by composer/arranger Lalo Schifrin. The result is an outstanding program, reflecting a unique event, featuring three legendary performers who share a united passion for opera and soccer. Tracklist: 01. 0:00:18 Orchestra / The national anthem of the USA 02. 0:01:48 Orchestra / Candide Overture. Bernstein 03. 0:06:25 Jose Carreras / O Souverain, O Juge, O Pere 04. 0:11:38 Placido Domingo / Quando le sere al placido. Verdi 05. 0:16:59 Luciano Pavarotti / Pourquoi Me Reveiller. Massanet 06.

0:20:07 Jose Carreras / With A Song In My Heart. Rodgers 07. 0:23:53 Placido Domingo / Granada. Lara 08. 0:27:57 Luciano Pavarotti / Non Ti Scordar Di Me. De Curtis 09. 0:31:45 The 3 Tenors / My Way 10. 0:36:00 The 3 Tenors / Moon River 11. 0:37:39 The 3 Tenors / Because 12. 0:40:05 The 3 Tenors / Singin' in the Rain 13. 0:42:41 Orchestra / Marche Hongroise. Berlioz 14. 0:47:31 Jose Carreras / Tu, Ca Nun Chiagne. De Curtis 15. 0:50:42 Placido Domingo / Amor, vida de mi vida. Torroba 16. 0:54:44 Luciano Pavarotti / Ave Maria. Schubert 17.

0:58:59 Jose Carreras / E lucevan le stelle. Puccini 18. 1:02:07 Placido Domingo / Vesti la giubba. Leoncavallo 19. 1:05:09 Luciano Pavarotti / Nessun Dorma. Puccini 20. 1:09:10 The 3 Tenors / America 21. 1:10:09 The 3 Tenors / All I Ask Of You 22. 1:12:09 The 3 Tenors / Funiculi, Funicula 23. 1:13:29 The 3 Tenors / Sous Les Ponts De Paris 24. 1:15:31 The 3 Tenors / Brazil 25. 1:16:58 The 3 Tenors / Be My Love 26. 1:18:47 The 3 Tenors / Marechiare 27. 1:22:02 The 3 Tenors / Lippen Schweigen 28.

1:24:40 The 3 Tenors / Santa Lucia Luntana 29. 1:28:04 The 3 Tenors / Those Were The Days 30. 1:30:30 The 3 Tenors / Te Quiero Dijiste 31. 1:33:59 The 3 Tenors / Torna A Surriento 32. 1:37:57 The 3 Tenors / La Donna E Mobile 33. 1:40:20 The 3 Tenors / Libiamo Ne' Lieti Calici Category Zubin Mehta (Conductor) - Pics, Videos, Dating, & News Zubin Mehta Male Born Apr 29, 1936 Zubin Mehta; (born 29 April 1936) is an Indian conductor of western classical music. He is the Music Director for Life of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra.

related links Review: Zubin Mehta Leads Israel Philharmonic In âResurrectionâ NYTimes - Nov 06, 2015 'The conductor steered the orchestra through the gamut of sonic dynamics in a Mahler symphony that testified to Carnegie Hallâs remarkable acoustics. ' Can One Cordon Off Evil Ideas From Art And Science? Huffington Post - Jan 29, 2014 'Many people face the dilemma today of deciding what media and speakers are acceptable to engage. Should you watch a movie produced by an anti-Semite? Should you listen to an opera written by a composer favored by the Nazis; what about accepting scientific research that was conducted by Nazis? These moral dilemmas are at the core of a larger issue -- can there be a separation from contemptible people and the art they create? \nArt is particularly problematic for those seeking morality in e...

Heads Of Asian Orchestras Converge On Mumbai For Meet The Times of India - Sep 20, 2013 'When renowned conductor <mark>Zubin Mehta</mark> performed for sold-out audiences in Mumbai last week, the term âaapro Zubinâ kept popping up in media reports. Â Â Â Â ' Controversial Kashmir Concert By Zubin Mehta Ends On Sour Note Yahoo News - Sep 08, 2013 ' By Fayaz Bukhari SRINAGAR, India (Reuters) - A concert by renowned conductor <mark>Zubin Mehta</mark> in Indian-controlled Kashmir, where separatist groups are fighting New Delhi\'s rule, was mired in controversy on Sunday, posing potential diplomatic embarrassment for Germany, whose ambassador organized the event. The concert, on the banks of picturesque Dal Lake, went off peacefully on Saturday night amid heavy security to deter any attack by separatist insurgents in one of the most milit... Learn about the memorable moments in the evolution of Zubin Mehta. CHILDHOOD 1936 Birth Born on April 29, 1936.

TWENTIES Show Less Mehta's first marriage was to Canadian soprano Carmen Lasky in 1958. They have a son, Mervon, and a daughter, Zarina. In 1964, they divorced. … Read More Two years after the divorce, Carmen married Mehta's brother, Zarin Mehta, formerly the Executive Director of the New York Philharmonic. Read Less In 1958, Mehta made his conducting debut in Vienna. … Read More The same year he won the International Conducting Competition in Liverpool and was appointed assistant conductor of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic. Read Less 1960 24 Years Old Mehta soon rose to the rank of chief conductor when he was made Music Director of the Montreal Symphony Orchestra in 1960, a post he held until 1967.

1961 25 Years Old In 1961, he was named assistant conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic; however, the orchestra's music director designate, Georg Solti, was not consulted on the appointment, and subsequently resigned in protest; soon after, Mehta himself was named Music Director of the orchestra, and held the post from 1962 to 1978. THIRTIES 1969 33 Years Old In July 1969, Mehta married Nancy Kovack, an American former film and television actress. … Read More Mehta, a permanent resident of the United States, retains his Indian citizenship. Read Less 1970 34 Years Old Mehta conducted the Los Angeles Philharmonic in the finale of Beethoven's 9th Symphony that concluded the legendary 12-hour Beethoven Marathon on the composer's 200th birthday, December 16, 1970, a concert at which his father Mehli Mehta, also conducted.

FORTIES 1978 42 Years Old In 1978 Mehta became the Music Director and Principal Conductor of the New York Philharmonic and remained there until his resignation in 1991, becoming the longest holder of the post. … Read More The Israel Philharmonic Orchestra (IPO) appointed Mehta its Music Advisor in 1969, Music Director in 1977, and made him its Music Director for Life in 1981.<br /><br /> Since 1985, Mehta has been chief conductor of the Teatro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino in Florence. (In 2015, he announced his intention to step down from this position in 2017.) Additionally, from 1998 until 2006, Mehta was Music Director of the Bavarian State Opera in Munich. The Munich Philharmonic named him its Honorary Conductor.

Since 2005, Mehta has been the main conductor (together with Lorin Maazel) of the Palau de les Arts, the new opera house of the Ciutat de les Arts i les CiÃ¨ncies in Valencia, Spain. Read Less FIFTIES Show Less Mehta conducted the Vienna New Year's Concert in 1990, 1995, 1998, 2007 and 2015. … Read More He has also made a recording of Indian instrumentalist Ravi Shankar's Sitar Concerto No. 2, with Shankar and the London Philharmonic Orchestra. Read Less In 1990, he conducted the Orchestra del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino and the Orchestra del Teatro dell'Opera di Roma in the first ever Three Tenors concert in Rome, joining the tenors again in 1994 at the Dodger Stadium, Los Angeles. 1991 55 Years Old At the Israel Prize ceremony in 1991, Mehta was awarded a special prize in recognition of his unique devotion to Israel and to the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra.

… Read More In 1995, Laureate of the Wolf Prize in Arts. In 1999, Mehta was presented the "Lifetime Achievement Peace and Tolerance Award" of the United Nations.<br /><br /> The Government of India honoured Mehta in 1966 with the Padma Bhushan and in 2001 with India's second highest civilian award, the Padma Vibhushan. Read Less 1992 56 Years Old In between those appearances he conducted the historic 1992 production of Tosca in which each act took place in the actual setting and at the actual time specified in the score. … Read More This production starred Catherine Malfitano in the title role, PlÃ¡cido Domingo as Cavaradossi and Ruggero Raimondi as Baron Scarpia.

Act I was telecast live from Rome's basilica of Sant'Andrea della Valle on Saturday, 11 July, at noon (Central European Daylight Saving Time); act II was telecast later that evening from the Palazzo Farnese at 9:40 p.m.; act III was telecast live on Sunday, 12 July, at 7:00 am from the Castel Sant'Angelo, also known as Hadrian's Tomb. Read Less 1994 58 Years Old In June 1994, Mehta performed the Mozart Requiem, along with the members of the Sarajevo Symphony Orchestra and Chorus at the ruins of Sarajevo's National Library, in a fund raising concert for the victims of armed conflict and remembrance of the thousands of people killed in the Yugoslav Wars. … Read More On 29 August 1999, he conducted Mahler Symphony No. 2 (Resurrection), at the vicinity of Buchenwald concentration camp in the German city of Weimar, with both the Bavarian State Orchestra and the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, sitting alongside each other.

He toured his native country India and home city Mumbai (Bombay) in 1984, with the New York Philharmonic, and again in NovemberâDecember 1994, with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, along with soloists Itzhak Perlman and Gil Shaham. Read Less LATE ADULTHOOD 1997 - 2005 2 More Events 1997 61 Years Old In 1997 and 1998, Mehta worked in collaboration with Chinese film director Zhang Yimou on a production of the opera Turandot by Giacomo Puccini which they took to Florence, Italy, and then to Beijing, China, where it was staged in its actual surroundings in the Forbidden City, with over 300 extras and 300 soldiers, for nine historic performances. … Read More The making of this production was chronicled in a documentary called The Turandot Project which Mehta narrated.

Read Less 2005 69 Years Old On 26 December 2005, the first anniversary of the Indian Ocean Tsunami, Mehta and the Bavarian State Orchestra performed for the first time in Chennai (formerly called Madras) at the Madras Music Academy. The Three Tenors - Music on Google Play The Three Tenors About the artist The Three Tenors were a popular operatic singing group during the 1990s and early 2000s, consisting of Spaniards Plácido Domingo and José Carreras and the Italian Luciano Pavarotti. The trio began their collaboration with a performance at the ancient Baths of Caracalla in Rome, Italy on 7 July 1990, the eve of the 1990 FIFA World Cup Final. Zubin Mehta conducted the orchestra of Maggio Musicale Fiorentino and the orchestra of Teatro dell'Opera di Roma. The recording of this debut concert became the best-selling classical album of all time and led to additional performances and live albums. Around 1.3 billion viewers worldwide watched their second televised performance four years later at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles.

They last performed together at an arena in Columbus, Ohio on 28 September 2003. How The 3 Tenors Sang The Hits And Changed The Game : Deceptive Cadence : NPR How The 3 Tenors Sang The Hits And Changed The Game Embed Embed How The 3 Tenors Sang The Hits And Changed The Game How The 3 Tenors Sang The Hits And Changed The Game Embed Embed Placido Domingo, José Carreras and Luciano Pavarotti at Dodgers Stadium in Los Angeles, with conductor Zubin Mehta. Courtesy of the artists hide caption toggle caption Courtesy of the artists Placido Domingo, José Carreras and Luciano Pavarotti at Dodgers Stadium in Los Angeles, with conductor Zubin Mehta. Courtesy of the artists The Three Tenors joined to conquer. When this trio of famous opera singers — José Carreras, Placido Domingo and Luciano Pavarotti — gave a one-night-only show at Los Angeles' Dodger Stadium on July 16, 1994, it was a massive spectacle watched by a billion people worldwide. More than that, the Three Tenors phenomenon permanently altered how a large amount of classical music is presented, packaged and sold.

The Event Timed to coincide with the Brazil-Italy World Cup final being held the next day at the Rose Bowl in nearby Pasadena, the live concert was filmed for TV broadcast in more than 100 countries. It was enough of a draw that it was shown either immediately before or after the big game in most places. The stadium was filled to capacity for the debonair Carreras, heroic Domingo and golden Pavarotti. The VIP list was a star-studded 1990s dream cast. Former President George H.W. Bush and his wife Barbara were in attendance, as were Tom Cruise, Arnold Schwarzenegger and David Hasselhoff (don't discount what an international megastar he was back then).

Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra were on hand, too — smiling and nodding indulgently as the three opera singers gingerly made their way through "Singin' in the Rain" and "My Way." Article continues after sponsorship Backed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Los Angeles Music Center Opera Chorus and conducted by Zubin Mehta (who also did much to shape the program), with arrangements by Hollywood legend Lalo Schifrin , the trio winged their way jovially, if not terribly convincingly, through a string of haphazardly linked opera arias, Neapolitan songs and easy-listening favorites for a crowd of 56,000. All three pairs of the tenors' eyes were glued to music stands through the musical theater tunes and American pop standards. The words for the English-language selections were hidden under nearly impenetrable accents. Through most of the show, Pavarotti chomped gum insouciantly.

YouTube "Beaming, smirking, sweating, bellowing, selling, blowing kisses, waving hankies, punching the air with victorious fists and the sound system with climactic not-too-high notes" is how Martin Bernheimer of The Los Angeles Times put it . In the end, none of that mattered one iota. The Three Tenors in Concert 1994 was an astonishing success on every level. Well before Carreras, Domingo and Pavarotti got to their grand-slam encores — the Verdi arias "La donna è mobile" and "Libiamo ne' lieti calici (Brindisi)" (which Atlantic Records had released as a single before the live date, and which went immediately to No. 1 on the European charts), followed by Puccini 's "Nessun dorma" — all the hard work had paid off. The CD and DVD versions of the concert, which the Warner label is rereleasing for this anniversary, went on to sell more than 8 million copies worldwide. But how had it come to be?

And was the Three Tenors phenomenon, as conductor Zubin Mehta dubbed it at the time, only just "like a comet " — having its blaze of glory and then vanishing without a trace? Hardly. Not only did the Three Tenors become a global pop-culture touchstone, but their albums, tours and videos shifted an entire segment of the music industry for good. The Backstory The 1994 Los Angeles concert wasn't the first time the three singers and Mehta had joined forces. In 1990, a concert presenter from Bologna, Italy, Mario Dradi, had brought the trio together in Rome for a concert at the Baths of Caracalla. According to a New York Times review of that concert, Pavarotti said the three had been asked "at least 50 times" to appear together before, but had always said no. YouTube What drew them into the Rome performance, they said, was a twofold impulse: to welcome Carreras' return to performing after defeating leukemia , and the tie-in to the 1990 World Cup, because football is a particular passion for them all.

Carreras is an avid Barcelona fan; Pavarotti played on his hometown team in Modena, Italy, as a young man; and Domingo, who has occasionally played in charity games, is a fervent Real Madrid supporter who was also tapped by FIFA a couple of years ago to serve on its ethics committee. It was Hungarian-born impresario Tibor Rudas, who was already Pavarotti's promoter, who created the Los Angeles spectacle. (Dradi was on the outs after he had sold the recording rights to the Rome show to the Decca label with no royalties going to the artists, only a fixed performance fee. Domingo in particular was said to have been furious : The Decca release was a worldwide smash in its own right that triggered the original Three Tenors craze.) Rudas — a born showman who had long worked in bookings in both Atlantic City, N.J., and Las Vegas — did his best to create an outsized event, all meant to help the audience forget that they were in a baseball stadium. His five-story set, inspired by the architecture of Budapest, was built in Hungary and assembled at an Air Force hangar in California.

It included massive amounts of suspended greenery, Hollywood production-house painted backdrops, and even waterfalls that had to be turned off at the beginning of the concert due to their noisiness. According to Rudas, the whole enterprise was so expensive that the ticket sales wouldn't cover his costs. Rudas wasn't the only impresario hovering around after the runaway success of Rome four years before. Both Carreras and Domingo had been working with German promoter Matthias Hoffmann, who also wanted in on the action. The single most telling moment in a hagiographic behind-the-scenes documentary that accompanies the LA concert film is when Domingo recounts how the performance came to be. Domingo says he went to FIFA himself to discuss an encore Three Tenors/World Cup extravaganza for Los Angeles in 1994, only to be told: "Mr. Rudas has already the rights." On camera, Domingo gives an elaborate shrug: "Well, fine, he has the rights, here we are." And one can't help but read some financial meaning into this account — securing those rights meant having a huge monetary stake in its success. And make no mistake, these spectacles, as a franchise, represented enormous money.

After the LA concert, they soon appeared in arenas and other huge venues around the world, from Tokyo to Göteborg, Sweden, with Hoffman finally at the helm after having bought Rudas' set and staging. The Money "Is it good money ?" Pavarotti once asked a reporter rhetorically about the lure of the Three Tenors billing. "By God, it's good money." Each tenor was paid about $1 million plus royalties for the Los Angeles show. (That would be worth approximately $1.6 million today.) When they headed out on their worldwide tour two years later, the three singers were earning $500,000 per concert apiece — about $800,000 in today's dollars — plus a percentage of all the merchandise sales and royalties. ( James Levine , who replaced Zubin Mehta on the later tours, earned a flat $500,000 per performance.) YouTube For the Los Angeles concert, VIPs were seated in the infield, and tickets went for between $15 and $1,000 apiece.

The New York Times quoted Rudas as saying that the ticket income for the LA show alone — not even counting the copious amount and variety of artist merchandise for sale at the venue, ranging from seat cushions to autographed baseballs — was a record-setting $13.5 million . The Los Angeles Times reported the concert gross as $12.5 million — still a huge number — and pointed out that the gross for the World Cup final between Brazil and Italy was just over $45 million. For a while in the mid- and late 1990s, after The Three Tenors hit, you couldn't open labels' new release books each month without having trios of singers vying for your attention. Tibor Rudas tried to strike gold again with a sopranos outfit (minus any household names). There were the African-American Three Mo' Tenors (at last count, actually 13 who have come and gone from the group).

A rush of regional acts sprang up, from The Irish Tenors to Australia's Ten Tenors to The Three Tenors from the Holy Land to Three Chinese Tenors to The Three Welsh Tenors to The Canadian Tenors (who have now settled into being just The Tenors, which is apparently description enough). Even the normally reserved label Harmonia Mundi entered the fray with a tongue-in-cheek trio of countertenors . The teenage Italian act Il Volo followed the same template, as did the Simon Cowell-produced quartet Il Divo . And just last week, a threesome called The Texas Tenors cracked the Billboard crossover Top 10 chart — and, yes, the Lone Star State singers, just like Carreras, Domingo and Pavarotti, have their very own PBS pledge-drive special. There's plenty of evidence that the original tenor trio altered PBS' music and pledge programming permanently — and it marked the point at which artist managers and record labels started to see PBS as a crucial driver for album and ticket sales. The 1990 Three Tenors show was so successful on PBS that it was shown nine times.

(Clarification: a former Decca label executive has written to me to say that on the first night that the Rome special was shown on PBS in March 1991, it was played nine times in a row on the same evening on New York's Channel 13.) James Scalem, then vice president for fundraising programming at PBS, told the New York Times in 1994 that it was "by far the highest grossing fundraising program in public television history." Though Scalem didn't give the Times specifics, Channel 13, the main New York City-area PBS member station, told the paper that broadcasts of the 1990 special from Rome had raised more than $1 million for the channel. The Relationships Very soon, Three Tenors-style partnerships between record labels, PBS, independent producers and artist managers crystallized in a symbiotic relationship that persists to this day. Artists from the teen purity-dream Charlotte Church back in the early 2000s to this year's Benedictines of Mary, Queen of Apostles nuns have launched projects with simultaneous album releases and PBS specials.

These dovetailing efforts are explicitly spelled out on press releases and on the sales sheets record labels distribute internally and also send out to retailers. (I've also been privy to such discussions during my own stints working at direct-to-consumer departments within two major-label companies, the now-defunct BMG and Sony, and when I was a columnist for Billboard Magazine, covering the business of classical music; in addition, my husband, Joshua Sherman , was directly involved in the production, sales and marketing of such crossover projects at BMG and later at Denon/Savoy Label Group.) PBS stations started to play an enormous role in the success of crossover acts at large venues across the U.S. During PBS pledge drives, many public TV stations showcase concert specials by such artists and offer, as high-priced pledge premiums, tickets to those artists' upcoming area concerts (which are booked by the artists' impresarios). This helps create regional touring circuits for performers who might otherwise not be able to sustain such tours. Using those public television pledge drives as their vehicles, impresarios can pre-sell huge venues with the help of PBS premium ticket sales — and, along the way, continue to build buzz for their artists. And those successes, in turn, drive more success.

If a crossover act does well during pledge drives, PBS stations will immediately buy into that group or artist's next television project and recycle previous TV pledge specials as well. That's a win for the artists and the impresarios, too, as the loop helps solidify an artist's American fan base between tours. The Legacy But what The Three Tenors — who, despite their diplomatic official billing in alphabetic order, soon became enshrined in American pop culture via Seinfeld as "Pavarotti, Domingo and that other guy " — also ushered in was a new era in crossover music that arguably outshined even the trios' own idols from previous generations, such as Mario Lanza in the 1940s and '50s and Enrico Caruso decades before that. Caruso and Lanza were surely icons, but they were singular superstars in their own respective eras. By contrast, The Three Tenors created a hugely lucrative subgenre. Call it "popera," call it "stadium classical," but a whole generation of artists from Andrea Bocelli to Jackie Evancho to Josh Groban (whom Domingo has recorded with ) were birthed on the Three Tenors aesthetic.

It features big vocal sounds (amplified, unlike traditional opera), backed by big, lush orchestras, in huge nonclassical venues — and sweepingly emotional old and new repertoire in arrangements that sound more like 1954 than 2014. And it's an aesthetic that still dominates the marketplace as well as the ears and eyes of concertgoers and TV viewers, even 20 years after that one concert at Dodgers Stadium. How The 3 Tenors Sang The Hits And Changed The Game - capradio.org How The 3 Tenors Sang The Hits And Changed The Game Wednesday, July 16, 2014 | Permalink Update RequiredTo play audio, update browser or Flash plugin . Placido Domingo, José Carreras and Luciano Pavarotti at Dodgers Stadium in Los Angeles. Courtesy of the artists NPR | Anastasia Tsioulcas The Three Tenors joined to conquer. When this trio of famous opera singers — José Carreras, Placido Domingo and Luciano Pavarotti — gave a one-night-only show at Los Angeles' Dodger Stadium on July 16, 1994, it was a massive spectacle watched by a billion people worldwide.

More than that, the Three Tenors phenomenon permanently altered how a large amount of classical music is presented, packaged and sold. The Event Timed to coincide with the Brazil-Italy World Cup final being held the next day at the Rose Bowl in nearby Pasadena, the live concert was filmed for TV broadcast in more than 100 countries. It was enough of a draw that it was shown either immediately before or after the big game in most places. The stadium was filled to capacity for the debonair Carreras, heroic Domingo and golden Pavarotti. The VIP list was a star-studded 1990s dream cast. Former President George H.W. Bush and his wife Barbara were in attendance, as were Tom Cruise, Arnold Schwarzenegger and David Hasselhoff (don't discount what an international megastar he was back then).

Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra were on hand, too — smiling and nodding indulgently as the three opera singers gingerly made their way through "Singin' in the Rain" and "My Way." Backed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Los Angeles Music Center Opera Chorus and conducted by Zubin Mehta (who also did much to shape the program), with arrangements by Hollywood legend Lalo Schifrin , the trio winged their way jovially, if not terribly convincingly, through a string of haphazardly linked opera arias, Neapolitan songs and easy-listening favorites for a crowd of 56,000. All three pairs of the tenors' eyes were glued to music stands through the musical theater tunes and American pop standards. The words for the English-language selections were hidden under nearly impenetrable accents. Through most of the show, Pavarotti chomped gum insouciantly. &nbsp; "Beaming, smirking, sweating, bellowing, selling, blowing kisses, waving hankies, punching the air with victorious fists and the sound system with climactic not-too-high notes" is how Martin Bernheimer of The Los Angeles Times put it .

In the end, none of that mattered one iota. The Three Tenors in Concert 1994 was an astonishing success on every level. Well before Carreras, Domingo and Pavarotti got to their grand-slam encores — the Verdi arias "La donna è mobile" and "Libiamo ne' lieti calici (Brindisi)" (which Atlantic Records had released as a single before the live date, and which went immediately to No. 1 on the European charts), followed by Puccini 's "Nessun dorma" — all the hard work had paid off. The CD and DVD versions of the concert, which the Warner label is rereleasing for this anniversary, went on to sell more than 8 million copies worldwide. But how had it come to be? And was the Three Tenors phenomenon, as conductor Zubin Mehta dubbed it at the time, only just "like a comet " — having its blaze of glory and then vanishing without a trace? Hardly. Not only did the Three Tenors become a global pop-culture touchstone, but their albums, tours and videos shifted an entire segment of the music industry for good.

The Backstory The 1994 Los Angeles concert wasn't the first time the three singers and Mehta had joined forces. In 1990, a concert presenter from Bologna, Italy, Mario Dradi, had brought the trio together in Rome for a concert at the Baths of Caracalla. According to a New York Times review of that concert, Pavarotti said the three had been asked "at least 50 times" to appear together before, but had always said no. &nbsp; What drew them into the Rome performance, they said, was a twofold impulse: to welcome Carreras' return to performing after defeating leukemia , and the tie-in to the 1990 World Cup, because football is a particular passion for them all. Carreras is an avid Barcelona fan; Pavarotti played on his hometown team in Modena, Italy, as a young man; and Domingo, who has occasionally played in charity games, is a fervent Real Madrid supporter who was also tapped by FIFA a couple of years ago to serve on its ethics committee. It was Hungarian-born impresario Tibor Rudas, who was already Pavarotti's promoter, who created the Los Angeles spectacle.

(Dradi was on the outs after he had sold the recording rights to the Rome show to the Decca label with no royalties going to the artists, only a fixed performance fee. Domingo in particular was said to have been furious : The Decca release was a worldwide smash in its own right that triggered the original Three Tenors craze.) Rudas — a born showman who had long worked in bookings in both Atlantic City, N.J., and Las Vegas — did his best to create an outsized event, all meant to help the audience forget that they were in a baseball stadium. His five-story set, inspired by the architecture of Budapest, was built in Hungary and assembled at an Air Force hangar in California. It included massive amounts of suspended greenery, Hollywood production-house painted backdrops, and even waterfalls that had to be turned off at the beginning of the concert due to their noisiness. According to Rudas, the whole enterprise was so expensive that the ticket sales wouldn't cover his costs. Rudas wasn't the only impresario hovering around after the runaway success of Rome four years before. Both Carreras and Domingo had been working with German promoter Matthias Hoffmann, who also wanted in on the action.

The single most telling moment in a hagiographic behind-the-scenes documentary that accompanies the LA concert film is when Domingo recounts how the performance came to be. Domingo says he went to FIFA himself to discuss an encore Three Tenors/World Cup extravaganza for Los Angeles in 1994, only to be told: "Mr. Rudas has already the rights." On camera, Domingo gives an elaborate shrug: "Well, fine, he has the rights, here we are." And one can't help but read some financial meaning into this account — securing those rights meant having a huge monetary stake in its success. And make no mistake, these spectacles, as a franchise, represented enormous money. After the LA concert, they soon appeared in arenas and other huge venues around the world, from Tokyo to Göteborg, Sweden, with Hoffman finally at the helm after having bought Rudas' set and staging. The Money "Is it good money ?" Pavarotti once asked a reporter rhetorically about the lure of the Three Tenors billing. "By God, it's good money." Each tenor was paid about $1 million plus royalties for the Los Angeles show.

(That would be worth approximately $1.6 million today.) When they headed out on their worldwide tour two years later, the three singers were earning $500,000 per concert apiece — about $800,000 in today's dollars — plus a percentage of all the merchandise sales and royalties. ( James Levine , who replaced Zubin Mehta on the later tours, earned a flat $500,000 per performance.) &nbsp; For the Los Angeles concert, VIPs were seated in the infield, and tickets went for between $15 and $1,000 apiece. The New York Times quoted Rudas as saying that the ticket income for the LA show alone — not even counting the copious amount and variety of artist merchandise for sale at the venue, ranging from seat cushions to autographed baseballs — was a record-setting $13.5 million . The Los Angeles Times reported the concert gross as $12.5 million — still a huge number — and pointed out that the gross for the World Cup final between Brazil and Italy was just over $45 million.

For a while in the mid- and late 1990s, after The Three Tenors hit, you couldn't open labels' new release books each month without having trios of singers vying for your attention. Tibor Rudas tried to strike gold again with a sopranos outfit (minus any household names). There were the African-American Three Mo' Tenors (at last count, actually 13 who have come and gone from the group). A rush of regional acts sprang up, from The Irish Tenors to Australia's Ten Tenors to The Three Tenors from the Holy Land to Three Chinese Tenors to The Three Welsh Tenors to The Canadian Tenors (who have now settled into being just The Tenors, which is apparently description enough). Even the normally reserved label Harmonia Mundi entered the fray with a tongue-in-cheek trio of countertenors . The teenage Italian act Il Volo followed the same template, as did the Simon Cowell-produced quartet Il Divo .

And just last week, a threesome called The Texas Tenors cracked the Billboard crossover Top 10 chart — and, yes, the Lone Star State singers, just like Carreras, Domingo and Pavarotti, have their very own PBS pledge-drive special. There's plenty of evidence that the original tenor trio altered PBS' music and pledge programming permanently — and it marked the point at which artist managers and record labels started to see PBS as a crucial driver for album and ticket sales. The 1990 Three Tenors show was so successful on PBS that it was shown nine times.

(Clarification: a former Decca label executive has written to me to say that on the first night that the Rome special was shown on PBS in March 1991, it was played nine times in a row on the same evening on New York's Channel 13.) James Scalem, then vice president for fundraising programming at PBS, told the New York Times in 1994 that it was "by far the highest grossing fundraising program in public television history." Though Scalem didn't give the Times specifics, Channel 13, the main New York City-area PBS member station, told the paper that broadcasts of the 1990 special from Rome had raised more than $1 million for the channel. The Relationships Very soon, Three Tenors-style partnerships between record labels, PBS, independent producers and artist managers crystallized in a symbiotic relationship that persists to this day. Artists from the teen purity-dream Charlotte Church back in the early 2000s to this year's Benedictines of Mary, Queen of Apostles nuns have launched projects with simultaneous album releases and PBS specials.

These dovetailing efforts are explicitly spelled out on press releases and on the sales sheets record labels distribute internally and also send out to retailers. (I've also been privy to such discussions during my own stints working at direct-to-consumer departments within two major-label companies, the now-defunct BMG and Sony, and when I was a columnist for Billboard Magazine, covering the business of classical music; in addition, my husband, Joshua Sherman , was directly involved in the production, sales and marketing of such crossover projects at BMG and later at Denon/Savoy Label Group.) PBS stations started to play an enormous role in the success of crossover acts at large venues across the U.S. During PBS pledge drives, many public TV stations showcase concert specials by such artists and offer, as high-priced pledge premiums, tickets to those artists' upcoming area concerts (which are booked by the artists' impresarios). This helps create regional touring circuits for performers who might otherwise not be able to sustain such tours. Using those public television pledge drives as their vehicles, impresarios can pre-sell huge venues with the help of PBS premium ticket sales — and, along the way, continue to build buzz for their artists. And those successes, in turn, drive more success.

If a crossover act does well during pledge drives, PBS stations will immediately buy into that group or artist's next television project and recycle previous TV pledge specials as well. That's a win for the artists and the impresarios, too, as the loop helps solidify an artist's American fan base between tours. The Legacy But what The Three Tenors — who, despite their diplomatic official billing in alphabetic order, soon became enshrined in American pop culture via Seinfeld as "Pavarotti, Domingo and that other guy " — also ushered in was a new era in crossover music that arguably outshined even the trios' own idols from previous generations, such as Mario Lanza in the 1940s and '50s and Enrico Caruso decades before that. Caruso and Lanza were surely icons, but they were singular superstars in their own respective eras. By contrast, The Three Tenors created a hugely lucrative subgenre. Call it "popera," call it "stadium classical," but a whole generation of artists from Andrea Bocelli to Jackie Evancho to Josh Groban (whom Domingo has recorded with ) were birthed on the Three Tenors aesthetic.

It features big vocal sounds (amplified, unlike traditional opera), backed by big, lush orchestras, in huge nonclassical venues — and sweepingly emotional old and new repertoire in arrangements that sound more like 1954 than 2014. And it's an aesthetic that still dominates the marketplace as well as the ears and eyes of concertgoers and TV viewers, even 20 years after that one concert at Dodgers Stadium. 1000+ images about The Three Tenors. on Pinterest | Domingo, Opera and Concerts Pinterest • The world’s catalog of ideas The Three Tenors. The Three Tenors were a popular operatic singing group during the 1990s and early 2000s, consisting of Spaniards Plácido Domingo and José Carreras and the Italian Luciano Pavarotti. The trio began their collaboration with a performance at the ancient Baths of Caracalla in Rome, Italy on 7 July 1990, the eve of the 1990 FIFA World Cup Final. Zubin Mehta conducted the orchestra of Maggio Musicale Fiorentino and the orchestra of Teatro dell'Opera di Roma.

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Question: Which Indian was conductor for the Three Tenors concert in Rome in 1990 and in Los Angeles four years later?
Answer: Zubin Mehta